For Eurydice's sake, we need to do more than go to vigils

By Jenna Price

Updated18 June 2018 — 4:01pmfirst published at 11:30am

Of all the violent deaths of women, the death of Eurydice Dixon, the 22-year-old rising comic, is one we can embrace when we signal our opposition to violence against women. We see it's not her fault. A stranger allegedly killed her and no one could predict that. It could not have been her fault. In the contemporary era, the story of Eurydice Dixon begins with Anita Cobby, the kind and beautiful nurse, also murdered by strangers. Janine Balding. Jill Meagher. Even school teacher Stephanie Scott who knew her murderer only in passing.

To us all, these are senseless deaths, unexpected. And so infrequent they fulfil that strange news criterion of the odd, the unusual.

Eurydice Dixon, whose body was found on a soccer field in the city's inner north.

So we do the small and the manageable to gain control and mastery over this hideous life. We share those photos, we go to vigils. We insist that the police and journalists use the appropriate language.

Well, good, small, manageable. But I challenge you to do more than that now. For every time you tut and tsk at the use of language, or the reliance on policing women's behaviour, do one more thing. Challenge the structures which allow this to happen. Insist your local politician knows how many women are killed each year. Ask why they refuse to fund that most basic of needs, safe shelter; why they refuse to fund the struggle to stop violence against women.

Advertisement

Eurydice Dixon doing stand-up.

Discuss this as elections loom and not just in the safety of your Facebook feed. Learn more about why it is so hard to change or challenge male power and why you can change it. Understand that Safe Schools did not go far enough - what our children need is not sex education but the kind of education which explains that for a better safer world we need to teach Safe Societies. Start with their parents in prenatal classes and then teach those values in childcare and preschool and in all the schools and institutions. Stop just clicking both your social media feeds and your tongues in easy disapproval.

Put pressure on governments. Put pressure on each other. That is the only thing which will save the lives of women and girls.

And know that there have been 29 other Eurydices this year. Qi Yu, just 28 when she went missing. Caroline Willis, 69. Karen Ashcroft, 52. Ingrid Driver Enalanga, 46, respected Aboriginal leader. Another 22-year-old, Teah Luckwell, mother of a small child, for whom there was a memorial in Tamworth. For these women, we held no nationwide vigils. If there was grief, it was restricted to family and friends only.

And what would the police say in the majority of cases of the violent deaths of women in Australia, if they were ever to say more than they had someone in custody and that person was known to the victim? If the police were to say anything at all, they would only say this: what happened to Eurydice Dixon rarely happens. But in Australia, the most dangerous place for women is home. And who is likely to kill them? People they know, people they love. Men.

Intimate partner violence is the largest single contributor to the burden of disease for women aged 18 to 44. It is not strangers. How we walk is irrelevant. How we live and love in our daily lives, that's what matters. Now is the time to stop making excuses for men, to stop saying boys will be boys. From this moment on, say boys must be decent human beings. Violence against women is not a pop-up moment. It comes about in an environment where we know there are modifiable risk factors yet we accept successive governments who do next to nothing to modify those risks.

Let's stop our cycle of episodic rage and grief. From here on let us keep our collective feet on the pedal, towards an end to violence against women.

The Victorian police told us what we already know: that women are not safe on the streets. What they left out is that we are less safe at home. The response of the police just demonstrates that the police force was not set up to fight patriarchy. They are not the solution. Fixing the way journalists write about these deaths is not the solution. Language matters but not nearly as much as structures.

Short of a revolution, there is only one real solution.

Our job now is to put pressure on governments to fund programs for social change. This will not happen just because we want it to. And pressure worked in Victoria. Pressure works. It will only happen if you hold power to account. And until you do, there will be more rapes and more murders, a few in public but thousands more where no one can hear the victims cry.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney, researching violence against women.